Amazon CloudWatch vs. AlertSite

If you use any AWS services, CloudWatch is the natural choice to monitor & troubleshoot your workload. Thankfully, for most AWS services, CloudWatch is either built-in or very easy to set up. However, being proficient in browsing & tracking the log events would take some training & practice. Having some experienced people on the team would help immensely, especially in spreading the skill to the rest of the team.

Incentivized

AlertSite is used in our organization to monitor our website and web applications in real-time to collect the super important metrics reflecting web page load time but from the user end (E2E) and that approaches helps us to understand what our website is experiencing in real-time.

Incentivized

• It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
• It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
• If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Incentivized

• What I have noticed so far is the fact that the AlertSite customer support team is trying to build relationships and go the extra mile to make sure we can overcome any occurring issues and they are quick to respond and provide sufficient guidance for implementing efficiently and fixing products issues.
• Tool has very handy and easy UI.
• It is very well in end to end Application URL monitoring and Front page URL monitoring.

Incentivized

• Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
• Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
• By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

Incentivized

• Support is inconsistent at times in terms of quality and response.
• Monitoring locations would have issues.
• Dashboard would go unavailable at times or lag behind.

Incentivized

Reviewing other cost saving options

Incentivized

Although the tool itself is easy to integrate and is readily available for use, it has its limitations. The key limitations of cloudwatch are with respect to cost incurred on log retention and log querying. While for key use cases this is sufficient, for more advanced use cases, Amazon CloudWatch doesn't work out. Also, obviously it is tightly coupled with AWS, which makes you look away if you need a single tool for all monitoring

Incentivized

Pretty good product only issue was cost

Incentivized

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

Incentivized

I've been unable to contact support after several attempts.

Incentivized

We use Cloudwatch for simpler monitoring, but these metrics and logs often feed into bigger ecosystems across our organization. The metrics and logs in Cloudwatch allow our developers quick and easy access to the data they need whilst easily integrating the same data into more prominent platforms for wider analysis, including Service desk support, SecOps, and ITOps monitoring within the organization.

Incentivized

We moved all of our services to Site24x7 after several years with AlertSite. We looked at Uptrends and Pingdom to name a few whilst evaluating options. Pingdom lacks functionality and Uptrends we found to have quite a steep learning curve. AlertSites platform and in particular the Deja-Click recorder is a standout tool against the other platforms. Sadly the upscaling costs of multi-location transactions can quickly add up.

Incentivized

• Positive for alarms and alert notifications once configured/customized.
• Has upfront learning curve, and cost can increase as does the alarm activity and monitoring details you may require.
• Cost-effective for any size organization keeping with AWS and utilizing its native tools is a savings in long-term ROI.

Incentivized

• AlertSite helps us capture website failures, this helps us to provide 100% uptime as promised with clients.
• We observed issues from AlertSite many times but their support is fast and helpful.
• It needs improvement to avoid false alerting as it wastes the time of the support person and can cause a business impact.

Incentivized